How Die Another Day Almost Blew Up the James Bond Franchise

It’s been 15 years since Pierce Brosnan’s final outing as 007 brought us glacier-surfing and an invisible car.

It’s been 15 years since the release of Die Another Day—a movie that set an unusual number of milestones for the James Bond franchise. It was released on the 40th anniversary of Dr. No, which kicked off 007’s remarkable run at the box office—at the time of Die Another Day’s release, more than $4 billion worldwide. It was the final James Bond movie starring Pierce Brosnan. And it is the only James Bond movie with a long and baffling cameo by Madonna.

Die Another Day isn’t exactly held in high esteem today. When it’s remembered at all, it’s remembered for its goofy excesses. (Say it with me: invisible car, surfing down a glacier.) It was the first Bond film to be released after 9/11, and 007’s frothy world-serving antics had already been outmoded by spies like Jason Bourne and Jack Bauer, who occupied the murkier, more complicated global landscape viewers actually recognized.

Revisiting Die Another Day for the first time since 2002, I was surprised to discover that it’s actually much closer to the grimmer post-9/11 Bond played by Daniel Craig than I remembered. It starts with the usual pyrotechnics. Bond night surfs into North Korea, sets off an exploding briefcase in the face of a general and his scheming son, and escapes on a hovercraft, capping the whole thing off with the customary corny quip.

And then—rather unexpectedly—his pursuers actually catch up to Bond. He’s thrown into a damp concrete cell and tortured for information. For more than a year. His captors waterboard him. They stab him with red-hot irons while he’s chained to a ceiling by his wrists. They let scorpions sting him until the pain is unbearable, then give him the antidote right before he dies so they can do it all over again. (Meanwhile, we’re all tortured by Madonna’s godawful theme song.) When Bond emerges from captivity 14 months later—long-haired, thick-bearded, and generally haggard—he’s subjected to one final psychological torture, when General Moon pretends he’s going to be executed by firing squad before releasing him in a prisoner exchange with the British government.

"Your people have abandoned you. Your very existence denied. Why stay silent?" his captors asked. And they kind of have a point! When Bond is finally released, he’s greeted not with a hero’s welcome, but with ice-cold skepticism by M (Judi Dench). "If I had my way, you’d still be in North Korea. Your freedom came at too high a price," she sneers. "Double-O status rescinded. You’re no use to anyone now."

In its first 20 minutes, Die Another Day can go toe-to-toe with the darkest moments in franchise history: Bond’s new wife being shot in the head on her wedding day in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, or Felix Leiter being fed to sharks in License to Kill, or Bond’s genitals being beaten with a knotted rope in Casino Royale. Die Another Day actually, briefly feels like it could evolve into a sobering look at a broken Bond, abandoned by his country and wracked with PTSD.

And then—yes—it becomes the James Bond movie in which Pierce Brosnan drives an invisible car and surfs down a glacier. (It's also the one with Halle Berry coming out of the sea in an orange bikini—a scene borrowed from Dr. No and inverted, with Bond himself as the one for us to ogle, in Casino Royale.) In the years since Die Another Day’s release, fans have basically written this movie off entirely—including Pierce Brosnan, who called Die Another Day "so ridiculous" in an interview with Total Film earlier this year.

And he's right—because in revisiting Die Another Day for the first time in 15 years, what surprised me most was all the other totally ridiculous shit I’d completely forgotten about. Do you remember that Bond and requisite bad girl Miranda Frost (Rosamund Pike) have sex in a bed that is a big block of ice that has been carved to look like a swan? Do you remember that Halle Berry’s Jinx finally kills the duplicitous Miranda by stabbing her with a knife that has already been stabbed through a copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War? ("Read this, bitch," quips Jinx to the corpse on the floor.) Do you remember that Q-Branch tests Bond’s mettle by putting him through a weird virtual reality mission in which Moneypenny is dead? Do you remember that Moneypenny uses that same VR technology for a porny tryst with a digital 007, or that Q eventually catches her in flagrante delicto?

And we have to talk about the villain of Die Another Day: a North Korean army colonel named Tan-Sun Moon who uses experimental gene therapy to disguise himself as a WASP-y British guy named Gustav Graves. Gustav Graves is basically the dude Elon Musk thinks he is: a rich diamond-miner/extreme-sports enthusiast who literally never sleeps ("He routinely performs dangerous stunts with enthralling coolness," says a hilariously fake glossy magazine profile of Gustav Graves, which Bond reads on a plane—the only time in the movie Bond bothers doing any actual intel.) Gustav Graves eventually dons an experimental suit of robo-armor. It allows Gustav Graves to administer electro-shocks at will. Gustav Graves kills Gustav Graves’s dad with it!

You might have noticed that I haven’t said much about James Bond himself. I’ve never been the biggest fan of Brosnan’s take on 007—if you ask me, his greatest contribution to the franchise was indirectly setting the stage for the Nintendo 64 adaptation of Goldeneye—and man, is Brosnan sleepwalking in this one. Even for a series that has always leaned heavily on stunt performers, a suspicious number of the action sequences in Die Another Day obscure Brosnan’s face: surfing in a helmet, fencing in a helmet, and a pretty good car chase on a frozen lake that is only seen in wide shots from afar. Bond’s extended stint as a prisoner-of-war at the beginning of the movie is, theoretically, a chance for Brosnan to show a little more depth than playing James Bond typically affords. Brosnan doesn’t take it, and is clearly much more comfortable as soon as Bond shaves and dons a suit and orders a room-service lobster and a ’62 Bollinger.

And if not for a very bold creative pivot, the Bond franchise might have continued in this sillier, campier direction. If audiences dug an invisible car, why not a flying car? If Bond can surf down a glacier, why can’t he surf down a volcano?

The creative team tasked with making Bond movie after Die Another Day must have at least contemplated those questions. Because here’s the other thing you might not remember: Die Another Day was a hit. A huge hit. The Daniel Craig era took James Bond to new heights—his four 007 movies to date are the four highest-grossing movies in franchise history—but right behind them is Die Another Day, which grossed nearly $40 million more than any James Bond movie before it. The movie was big enough that Die Another Day’s screenwriters wrote an entire Jinx-centric spinoff, which was in development for a year, with Berry to star and The Queen’s Stephen Frears to direct.

And then MGM killed it—sensing, perhaps, that Die Another Day’s spectacular box-office gross was a lucky break for an awful movie, and that it would be a bad idea to push that luck any further. Brosnan was dismissed from the role of 007, and three years later, Daniel Craig debuted in Casino Royale—a script co-written by the same screenwriters behind Die Another Day. If not for the bold and correct decision to make a sharp pivot away from the highest-grossing James Bond movie in history, who knows where 007 might have gone next?